Interview with Dr Josephine Jackson: Libya, Syria, Elite Interviewing and the R2P

Dr Josephine Jackson is a MECACS Research Associate; Fellow at the Centre for Global Law and Governance (University of St Andrews School of International Relations); and a ‘New Leader’ with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Josephine’s doctoral thesis is titled: ‘U.S. and UK Engagement With the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P): Evaluating the Legacy of Libya Through the Lens of Syria’.

This interview was conducted and published by Harry Stage, MECACS Blog Administrator Intern, 4^th year International Relations and Russian student.

Why did you decide on this topic for your dissertation idea of your PhD?

The seed for this dissertation was planted in my master’s program, which I did several years prior to beginning my Ph.D. The inspiration came in a module taught by Dr. Fiona McCallum Guiney, who later became my Ph.D. supervisor. I was writing a paper on a new norm that had come out of the United Nations in 2005 called the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and how it applied to a situation that had recently occurred in Kyrgyzstan. In 2010, there had been some violent clashes in the country, but I was having a difficult time finding information about it. I remember meeting with Fiona and mentioning that I was struggling with finding information. This led to a broader conversation about R2P and how it related to the contemporary context.

As background, I had been interested in World War II, the Holocaust and genocide studies and prevention for a very long time. I was also inspired by Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell, which is one of the seminal texts in this area. When the Arab Spring erupted in late 2010, early 2011, there were cases of state-sponsored mass atrocities in Libya and Syria, occurring at about the same time. R2P became front and center in debates on solutions. So, when I began my research in 2016, I had all the pieces to analyse the very different responses that the U.S., the U.K., and the U.N. had to these two cases which, on face, seemed so similar. But in fact, they were completely different.

On your methodology, why did you decide on elite interviewing? 

Initially, I didn’t. In the beginning, I didn’t believe that I would have access to high-level people, so elite interviewing wasn’t even on my radar. I planned instead to talk to mid and lower-level people that were tasked with carrying out the various policies and procedures handed down from above. I couldn’t, however, get any lower-level or mid-level people to talk to me, which was surprising. But then when I started my fieldwork preparation, something happened that I didn’t expect: I got a high-level contact in the U.S. and a high-level contact in the U.K. very early on in the process. And from there, it literally snowballed. In the months that followed, I would conduct an interview and the interviewee would often say something like, “I think you should talk to so-and-so. I will connect you.” And before I knew it, my project had turned into an elite interviewing study, when I had never intended for that to be the outcome.

It is also critical to note that, had Hillary Clinton won the election in the United States in 2016, many of the American officials whom I spoke with would have likely been in her government, and I wouldn’t have had access to them. However, because Donald Trump won the election, many of these officials were not involved in his administration, and so they had more time for things like talking to graduate students.

Did you find it daunting after having planned to speak with lower-mid level officials to interview elites?

Yes, I did. At first, I was shocked that they were willing to speak with me. I’m not well-connected, nor do I come from an elite background. But what I realised early on, and remained true all the way throughout the Ph.D. and remains true now, is that the principals that I spoke to didn’t come about because of who I was. I was just a graduate student. It was my topic that drove this. And that coincided with another reality: the acute political climates and reckonings that were happening in the U.S. and the U.K. at that time meant that the people who had served in high-level posts in these administrations were thinking about their legacies, as well as the fall-out from some of the major issues they worked on, namely Libya and Syria. I happened to show up at a time when they wanted to talk about these things. And I wanted to listen.

What I also realized early on in my interviewing was that I didn’t necessarily need to have the skills of a top-level interviewer to be able to draw these experts out. I brought my own strengths to the table. I am good at listening, and I was passionate about my topic. And I wanted to know what they really thought, which in practice meant that I didn’t need to say very much. I wasn’t doing a fact-based, line-by-line, “Here’s what happened in Libya, here’s what happened in Syria, etc.” Instead, I wanted to identify their perspectives and understand how those views shaped the policy outcomes that we saw – perspectives that I knew, from reading the literature, weren’t being reflected. It was this valuable piece that was missing: the insights, perceptions, and efforts of this relatively small group of people who were tasked with devising intervention strategies for either case. I had the skills to bring this forward. And that’s what I tried to do.

Did you have any formal training in interviewing or experience from previous research projects?

I had done some training. But nothing systematic, and nothing that focused on sustaining elite interviewing over a multi-year project such as this. But my supervisors were fantastic. I had many sessions practicing interview techniques, in which Dr Fiona McCallum Guiney was able to offer some tips. She also gave me a rubric, which was very helpful.

It took a good ten to twelve interviews before I started gaining momentum. I conducted forty-six interviews in all. I also interviewed several people more than once. And since most of the interviews lasted several hours, I got a lot of practice. Learning by doing is the most valuable way of learning. Then I would come back from a fieldwork stint and do a debrief session with Fiona. I would self-correct, she would offer more tips, and I would head out again. I also watched YouTube videos on interviewing, and I read handbooks and different materials, so I didn’t feel I was going in totally blind.

Operation Unified Protector medallion given to Josephine by the retired U.S Air Force general that commanded the air component of OUP. The front of the medallion depicts the land, sea and air forces involved in Libya and the back shows the 32 NATO member states and partners that participated in the operation.

How did your biases and positioning affect the process?

In terms of positioning, two things float to the top. The first is that my status as a graduate researcher in an academic program that’s as well known and well regarded as St Andrews was a critical factor in helping me to obtain interviews. I know this because many of my interviewees told me that they were aware that St Andrews, and particularly the School of IR, had a strong reputation. So that allowed me to be perceived as a serious researcher from a strong academic program.

I also tried to be careful to not let my views shape or lead the interview questions. But this was challenging, as some of my interviewees asked me point-blank what I felt about certain things – for example, what I believed to be the causes of the Iraq War in 2003 – in an attempt to build trust. I tried to establish that level of trust in part by acknowledging my positionality both as a researcher and as an American in Washington, London, Paris, New York, or wherever I was. I also tried to let the questions drive it. Yes, I had views, but so did they, and I wanted the focus to be on the latter. Also, you rarely have absolute certainty, even when you’re at the top. I thought, I could use that as a foundation upon which their positionality and mine together can yield some insights that could be useful for the ongoing debates about why we saw the outcomes that we did in Libya and Syria, and what, if anything, we might want to do differently going forward. So, yes, I was always conscious of my bias. It was a constant negotiation of how best to navigate it. I wouldn’t ever tell you that I perfected it. I don’t know if that’s even possible in research. But instead, I accommodated it and tried to use it to make my project better.

When you approached the university’s Teaching and Research Ethics Committee, was this regarding the methodology that you planned to use, or did you have to outline what sort of questions you wanted to ask and who to?

It was more about the broad way in which the research was conducted. The ethical approval process at St. Andrews is a process that’s taken very seriously. You can’t commence field work without obtaining approval and showing that you’ve thought about issues like data retention or confidentiality. The answers to some of these things are not as self-evident as you would think.

When completing my ethics approval application in advance of my fieldwork, I filled out answers to questions such as ‘approximate topic guiding’ that established the areas in which I would be investigating. I didn’t know at that point what my interview questions were going to be because I sought ethical approval before I started sending out interview contacts. So, I didn’t say anything along the lines of “I want to ask Person X about Topic Y.” It was more like a summary of the general themes of my research at that time, and then some questions that I was interested in answering through the project.

Why Constructivism? What were the failings, if any, of using this approach?

The short answer is that I was drawn to constructivism because I wanted to focus on social processes. In particular, I was drawn to the negotiations, discussions, relationships, ideas, language, and all the things that went into the decision-making that led to the foreign policy outcomes that we saw in Libya and Syria. Constructivism, with its emphasis on all of that, was the logical choice for me. Yet, throughout my Ph.D., there were people who vehemently disagreed with my choice, maintaining that constructivism is a waste of time and I would be better off with, say, realism or the English School. Realism is a wonderful tool as a theoretical lens, and so is the English School, and many others. But your approach should always be driven by your research question and what you want to find out. What I wanted to uncover required tapping into ‘the social’ – because this, in relation to Libya and Syria, was the hole in the literature I was trying to help fill. I thus needed a framework that would help me develop, support, and extend a social epistemology and ontology all the way through my dissertation. Constructivism did that.

However, the downside to using constructivism was that I wasn’t going to get some of the information that other theoretical trends might be better suited to capture. For example, I’ve heard some compelling balance of power accounts on the Libya or Syria cases. I appreciated those contributions. But I also kept in mind what I was seeking to do, and why. One of the reasons I wanted to undertake this research, other than my belief in R2P and what it seeks to do, was to highlight how particular leaders, their voices, and their vantage points literally construct foreign policy – and how much of that is social all the way down. We already know this happens. But too often we don’t know it when we see it, which then heightens the risk of learning the wrong lessons from major foreign policy events. So, there was a hole that hadn’t been filled by the existing research on Libya and Syria; one that made a strong argument for using constructivism. Lastly, constructivism, like any other theoretical trend, doesn’t do everything. But if you focus on what it can do, and then do it well, it can be a powerful tool for illuminating key connections in International Relations and explaining why they matter – which I think is the whole point of the discipline. 

If you expand this research, would you like to interview Libyans and Syrians to diversify the samples?

Yes, I would. One of the reasons that I was unable to include the perspectives of Libyans and Syrians is that I would have been unable to get ethical approval at that time to travel to Libya and Syria to interview people. Remember that in 2016, when I started my Ph.D., I had to design a research project that was original, feasible, and doable within 3-4 years. Proposing a project that incorporated the perspectives of Libyans and Syrians themselves was not feasible then in part due to the turmoil in both countries and the challenges faced by both peoples. So, I focused on what I could do. I sought to capture the social aspects that underpin R2P-themed intervention – subject to the constraint, of course, that I had a strict word count in the Ph.D. (which I ultimately had to get permission to exceed). I’m hoping to expand further on this in post-Ph.D. projects. I think my research can be a building block upon which other research studies are built or expanded. After my Ph.D. concludes, I want to focus on the personal agency of Libyans and Syrians themselves. I also want to focus a bit more on the roles of France, Russia, and China. Unfortunately, there were very real limitations on what I could do in this project. But the upside is that my gaps create openings for other scholars, or even for me, to fill in subsequent projects that, in turn, can benefit from the years that have elapsed since the Libya and Syria crises began.